The art of unconventional ambition & the accidental career

These boots are made for walkin'

There is a fairly well-established career path at the Bar. You sign the Roll, spend some years as a junior, develop a practice and, if things go well, perhaps take silk. For some, there is the possibility of judicial appointment. For others, a long and fulfilling career as junior counsel is quite enough.

It's a perfectly respectable model. The difficulty is that it doesn't leave much room for imagining anything else.

I'm approaching seven years at the Bar, and I still couldn't tell you with any certainty what I want to be when I grow up. That isn't for want of ambition. If anything, I have rather too much of it, frequently directed at things that have very little to do with the conventional business of being a barrister.

I run a family law trial practice, write about obscure corners of property law, and have somehow found myself building a national technology and publishing platform for the legal profession. I am also a mother, a long-term foster carer, and someone who still changes from Havaianas into court shoes in the car park because I cannot bring myself to wear the latter for a moment longer than necessary.

None of these things was part of a grand plan. Most of them weren't even part of a modest one. And yet, looking back, there's a thread connecting them. I've spent much of my career trying to find my place in a profession whose expectations I don't always fit. Increasingly, I've come to wonder whether the profession itself might have room to change.

A career in retrospect

My route to the Bar wasn't particularly linear. I studied law while raising two young children, established my own firm as a solicitor, and worked across family, criminal and children's law. Along the way, I spent time at Victoria Police Prosecutions, worked as an associate in the Criminal Division of the County Court, and lectured in criminal law at Swinburne.

I wasn't working towards a carefully mapped destination. I was taking opportunities, developing skills, following interests and, quite often, trying to make the practical demands of work and family fit together.

I have written elsewhere about the difficulty of building a career when you don't have the same disposable time as everyone else. The profession has a tendency to reward visibility, and visibility often requires being available for the dinners, events and informal conversations through which professional relationships are made.

That was not always an option for me. But there were advantages to the route I took, even if I couldn't see them at the time.

Criminal practice taught me about evidence and advocacy. The Children's Court and family violence work gave me an appreciation of the human realities that sit behind so many family law disputes. My time in a judge's chambers taught me something about how cases are received and decided, rather than merely how they are presented. Running my own firm taught me an entirely different collection of lessons, many of them acquired through making mistakes I would have preferred to avoid.

By the time I came to the Bar, I had accumulated a somewhat untidy collection of professional experiences. They didn't fit neatly into a particular specialisation, but together they proved extraordinarily useful. I suspect many careers look like that when examined closely. We describe them afterwards as though each step led deliberately to the next, when in reality a great deal of professional development comes from chance, circumstance and the occasional decision that seemed sensible at the time.

Finding a place at the Bar

I signed the Bar Roll in May 2020. Going to the Bar hadn't been part of any grand plan. I sat the Bar Exam on something of a whim, thought I'd give it a crack, and rather inconveniently passed. It seemed I was going to be a barrister.

The Bar suited me in ways I hadn't entirely anticipated. I have ADHD, something I've written about previously, and I am not naturally the restrained, meticulously organised personality I once assumed a barrister ought to be. There are parts of professional life I find disproportionately difficult, and others that seem to come almost instinctively. Advocacy falls into the latter category.

I enjoy the complexity of a brief, the need to understand competing narratives and the process of finding a coherent argument in a large and often contradictory body of material. I enjoy the immediacy of court, where preparation meets unpredictability and an argument sometimes needs to be rebuilt in the space of a few questions from the Bench.

My advocacy style is probably more narrative and impassioned than convention would prescribe. I've had judges comment on it, sometimes with evident curiosity. But it is a style that feels natural to me, and one I've become more comfortable with as my practice has developed.

That was an important discovery. For a long time, I had confused professionalism with conformity. I thought being taken seriously required adopting a particular manner, temperament and way of working. The Bar taught me that competence and personality are not the same thing. There are professional standards that are essential, but there is more than one way to meet them. It also taught me that the same principle applies to building a practice.

The opportunities you don't plan

Some of the most valuable developments in my career have come from things I wasn't particularly trying to achieve.

A few years ago, I was briefed in a property matter involving a defined benefit superannuation interest. It was a technical issue, one of those areas of family law that tends to inspire either intense interest or an immediate desire to find someone else to deal with it. I found it interesting. I researched the problem, followed it further than the immediate brief required and eventually wrote an article about what I'd learnt. It was intended to be useful to other practitioners, rather than a deliberate exercise in developing a specialisation.

The response surprised me. The article circulated beyond my usual professional networks, including interstate, and solicitors I had never met began contacting me about similar issues. One brief came from a NSW solicitor who had struggled to find another barrister willing to take on the particular work.

I mention this not because defined benefit superannuation is especially central to my professional identity. It isn't. But because the experience illustrated something that has become increasingly important to me. The opportunities that shape a career don't always arrive through the recognised channels. Sometimes they come from following a curiosity, sharing something useful or doing work that isn't immediately connected to the next conventional career milestone.

Writing became one of the ways I developed my practice. It allowed me to build professional relationships and demonstrate expertise without relying exclusively on the networking opportunities that had often been difficult to accommodate earlier in my career.

I hadn't found a better way of doing things, necessarily. I'd found one that worked for me. And once I began thinking about professional opportunities in those terms, I started noticing how many other people were trying to do much the same thing.

Making room

The more I found my own ways of developing a practice, the more conscious I became of how much professional opportunity depends on being in the right place, knowing the right people and having the time to make yourself known.

The legal profession is full of talented people whose careers don't fit the usual mould. Parents and carers, regional practitioners, people returning after time away, lawyers changing direction or moving between jurisdictions, and those whose interests extend well beyond the traditional boundaries of legal work. There are also people who simply don't enjoy the established forms of professional networking, or who work independently, or lack access to the networks through which opportunities have historically circulated.

None of that makes them less capable, less ambitious or less committed to their careers. But the profession doesn't always make it easy for them to participate on equal terms. We still tend to organise professional life around a fairly narrow set of assumptions about how people participate, develop relationships and progress.

I knew something about that. I had studied law with two young children, built a practice around their needs and spent years trying to reconcile professional ambition with the realities of a life that didn't always accommodate it. My circumstances are different now. I have a partner who is my loudest supporter, and I am still Mum. I'm also a long-term foster carer and an advocate for children with dyslexia. I have passed up opportunities because I chose my children instead, and I'd make the same call again.

I don't regard those decisions as evidence of diminished ambition. But I do wonder how many capable people we overlook because the opportunities we offer them assume a particular kind of life.

That question lingered in my mind for my entire career. Over time, I became increasingly interested in it — not only as it affected my own career, but as a broader problem about how the profession works. And eventually, rather than continuing to work around the problem in my own career, I decided to see whether I could do something about it.

Barristers are not, by temperament or by training, builders. The Bar is designed around independence, one practitioner and one brief at a time, and that is a fine design for advocacy and a poor one for anything that needs other people to turn up before it's finished.

Nevertheless, in 2025 I founded The Profession, a national membership platform for Australian legal practitioners, while carrying a full trial practice. I had no particular background in technology or publishing. I certainly hadn't imagined that my career as a barrister would involve thinking about software architecture, digital platforms, editorial strategy or the economics of professional information. I built it because the profession works in isolation far more than it admits, and because the connections that make a career — knowing who is out there, what they're doing and what opportunities exist — have always gone disproportionately to the people with evenings free to go looking. Part of me built it for the law student who had none.

The idea was straightforward enough: bring together the information, organisations, events, education and opportunities that are scattered across the profession, and make them accessible to people regardless of where they practise, whom they know or how much time they have to go looking. It grew from the same frustrations that had shaped my own career: the fragmentation of professional information, the importance of informal networks, and the practical difficulty of participating in a profession that often assumes everyone has the same time and access.

What I hadn't entirely anticipated was how readily others would recognise the problem. The response to The Profession has been encouraging, not simply in terms of its growth, or because people have used it, but because practitioners, organisations and others across the profession have been willing to engage with an approach that departs from some of the ways we've traditionally connected with one another.

I don't think that means everyone wants to abandon the profession's traditions. Nor should they. What it suggests is that there is an appetite for different ways of participating in professional life. People want access to opportunities beyond their immediate networks. They want to discover things they didn't know existed. They want to connect with the wider profession without necessarily having to organise their lives around its established social and institutional structures.

Perhaps the profession is more ready to change than we give it credit for. And perhaps, increasingly, people want to feel that there is room for the sort of career they actually want to have. That's what I've come to question most about the conventional career template. It assumes that professional ambition has a particular direction, when in reality it can take any number of forms.

Where to from here?

Every so often, a more senior barrister asks whether I intend to take silk. It's a generous question, and one I take as a compliment. I don't have a particularly satisfactory answer. Perhaps I will. Perhaps, one day, I'll be interested in judicial appointment. I have enormous respect for both paths, and I wouldn't presume to rule either out. But I'm not certain that either is what I want, or that I need to decide just yet.

For now, I enjoy the work I do. I want to continue developing as an advocate, taking on difficult cases and becoming better at the craft. I also want to write, build things, explore ideas and contribute to the profession in ways that don't necessarily involve appearing in court. Those ambitions are not mutually exclusive. And that, I think, is where our understanding of professional careers could use some expansion.

The Bar has a strong tradition of independence, but we can be surprisingly conventional in the way we imagine success. We tend to understand progress vertically, as a movement towards greater seniority, status or institutional recognition. There is nothing wrong with that kind of progress. But it isn't the only kind.

A practitioner might build an exceptional career as junior counsel. Another might become a specialist in an area few others understand. Someone else might teach, write, establish a business, contribute to law reform or develop something that changes how the profession operates. Some will do several of those things, at different stages of their lives. We should be able to recognise those careers as successful in their own right, rather than treating them as diversions from the main event.

I don't know whether the profession is changing as quickly as I would like. Institutions with long histories rarely do. But I am encouraged by the people I've encountered, the conversations I've had and the enthusiasm with which new ideas have been received.

There seems to be a growing recognition that the profession is made up of people with different circumstances, interests, abilities and ambitions. That those differences are not necessarily problems to be managed, but qualities that can make the profession stronger. I hope that continues. Because I don't think the answer is to dispense with the traditional pathways. It's to make room for more of them.

And perhaps that's the most useful thing I've learnt from my own career. You don't have to know exactly where you're going to be making progress. Sometimes the interesting opportunities are the ones that appear when you stop looking exclusively towards the next expected destination.

I still change into my court shoes in the car park. I expect I always will. But I'm rather glad that the places they've taken me haven't all been on the map.